"The Book of Me, Written by You" - Childhood reading

The prompt for the week is:    

Childhood reading

The Brief:

• Did you read as a child?
• Did you experience the wonder of bedtime stories?
• Favourite books
• Did your childhood reading influence you?
• Special moments and memories

I cannot remember being read to as a child. I can remember going to the library in Kindergarten and having them read to us. In the next grade we still did that but we could get some books to take home to read or have read to us. I always took them home to read or even just sit there looking at the pretty pictures.

I still remember the years one of my teachers would read to us from the series "Little House on the Prairie" and loved how it took you through another person's life. I couldn't believe all that information was in this tiny book.

The Library in Walden, NY

By the time I was in about the 2-3 grade, I found libraries. I found I could go there and read a book and be taken anywhere in my imagination. I started to read anything I could get my hands on, so I could read or try to. I say try to because they found when I was in grade 1, I had a learning disability where I had a hard time comprehending what I was reading. Was I reading? Yes, but understanding what you are reading and reading are two different things. Because of this, I was kept back in the first grade and then after this grade kept in the lower graded bracket of classes because of the problem. However, by the time I reached grade 8, I found young adult romance books.

Over the years, I did try and get my nieces and nephews interested in reading. With my nieces, they seemed to get into it a little bit but I put it down to still trying to find the genre they liked. They now love reading and have passed that along to their children. My nephews, they never took to the reading thing as far as I know. I know their mother, Jean, wasn't big into reading and thought it was a waste of time. I have lost contact with those nephews, so I have no idea if they ever took up reading at all.

The you adult books were great because they almost always had a happy ending and I was taken from my not so happy home to places where people did have other problems but they didn't seem as bad as mine and most of the time by the end of the book, they had happy endings. It really took the focus off of my own life and put it some place more optimistic.

By the time I was in high school, I had moved on to reading adult romance novels. I started reading Harlequin Romances and found they were interesting. However, after this some of the other lines from the same company came out and they were more expressive on the sex part and less on the romance and relationship part. Even today, I bounce between different lines. I do both electronic books (iTunes, ibooks, harlequin app, and amazon) and paperbacks but in the last 8 or so years mainly stick with the electronic books due to paperbacks taking up most of the house. In fact today, I still find them in suitcases, closets and nightstands I haven't looked into for awhile.

One thing I am sure of is I'm glad I can read in any language as my grandmother and great grandmother's could not for either most or part of their lives. They missed out on taking adventures or catching up with news because they could not read.


  Check back for the continuation of "The Book of me, Written by You" series.